Targets for maximum waiting times and patient prioritisaton: evidence from England

This paper develops a model for managing hospital waiting lists with two types of patients. The model focuses on answering how hospital priorities change following the introduction of targets for maximum waiting times and how uncertainty about future queue streams impact on this decision making. The paper shows that the main mechanism for meeting the target is reducing the waiting times for long-waiting patients at the expense of short-waiting patients. We test the model using administrative hospital data for the English NHS. We detect statistically significant changes in prioritisation between different groups of patients.